My research focuses on ritual, gender and ethics, themes that I explore in the context of the Islamic revival in Pakistan. My dissertation ‘Islam, Ritual and the Ethical Life: Dawat in the Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan’ examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. This research looks at how dawat, which involves arduous travel and great personal sacrifice, is understood by Tablighis to be a means for the cultivation of personal piety and interpersonal ethics. This research shows how this Tablighi understanding of dawat not only places them in opposition to Pakistani liberals but, crucially, also leads them to reject Islamist political activism and even the idea of an Islamic state. My research speaks to broader questions about the relationship between Islam, secularism and modernity.
Related to this is my commitment to understanding the discursive and legal construction of Muslims and Islam in the Global War on Terror. For this I turn to postcolonial theory. I also have an enduring interest in cultural approaches to capitalism and development. Supervisors: Richard Handler
The conclusion to The Promise of Piety argues that the struggle over the boundary of religion is ... more The conclusion to The Promise of Piety argues that the struggle over the boundary of religion is a key site through with claims to soveriegnty are articulated in modernity and outlines Islamic piety in the Tablighi Jamaat as a distinct form of sovereign transcendence.
The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order, 2024
The Promise of Piety examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching... more The Promise of Piety examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. The book highlights both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.
The central question of this class is what is politics? While many disciplines focus on the study... more The central question of this class is what is politics? While many disciplines focus on the study of formal state institutions like government and political parties, anthropologists ask how relations of power are distributed, organized, produced, and reproduced in social life and how they are contested. To this end, anthropologists are interested in the rituals, symbols and ideologies that shape relations of power and focus on how politics relates to other aspects of society like family, religion, and economics. The first part of this class will explore classic anthropological approaches to politics. Drawing on these theories, we will examine the forms of inequality and exclusion that structure the modern nation-state and explore the demands for equality, recognition and belonging from religious, ethnic, and racial minorities. We also explore the inequalities and imbalances of power between nation-states in a larger world system and how these power imbalances give rise to and inform approaches to human rights, humanitarianism, development, terrorism, and democracy.
Comment on Hierarchy as Democratic Value in India: An Informal Essay by Anastasia Piliavsky, Cur... more Comment on Hierarchy as Democratic Value in India: An Informal Essay by Anastasia Piliavsky, Current Anthro[pology, Vol. 64, No. 5.
Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety
movement, the Tablighi Jama... more Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, believe that Muslims have abandoned ‘religion’ (din) for ‘the world’ (dunya) and this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). The only way to draw Muslims to Islamic practice, they say, is through their own distinct, ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat), which is the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue because it is modelled on Prophetic example. In this article, I argue that dawat represents what Birgit Meyer has called a ‘sensational form’, an authorized set of practices and techniques for mediating a relationship to transcendental power and creating divine presence. But dawat is structured by an internal tension. On the one hand, dawat requires performing the Prophetic model in order to create a ‘direct’ relationship to God, but, on the other, creating a ‘connection’ between Muslims depends on incorporating new genres and mediums drawn from popular culture and mass media that stretch the boundaries of religion. This moral ambivalence, however, does not just lead to moral failure but instead is addressed through an emphasis on pious companionship (sohbat) and through submission to the authority of pious others. Moral ambivalence, therefore, becomes the generative ground for religious authority. The production and reproduction of religious authority in turn serves as the basis for incorporating novel forms of mediation in order to address diverse and changing social, political and economic contexts while retaining the aura of religious continuity.
Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam fro... more Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam from what they imagine to be a deluge of incidents of blasphemy, a veritable moral panic organized around a set of blasphemy laws pertaining to the regulation and protection of Islam. The violence of blasphemy politics, which is disproportionately directed at sectarian and religious minorities, is predicated on the claim that is the duty and mandate of the state to enforce the blasphemy laws, and where the state fails, the onus falls on ordinary Muslims to fulfill the demands of Islam. In this article, I focus on the response to this blasphemy politics by Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. Like other Islamic groups in Pakistan, Tablighis consider blasphemy to be a grave sin and a deep threat to the Islamic community, but Tablighis believe that the solution to the growing incidence of blasphemy is to spread virtue through their distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat). I show that these different ethical responses to blasphemy reflect different approaches to the relationship between Islam and state sovereignty. Specifically, I argue that blasphemy politics presupposes the sacralization of the state but Islamic piety among Pakistani Tablighis provides an alternative ethical framework for addressing the moral injury of blasphemy.
The Immanent Frame
Rethinking Public Religion: Word, Image, Sound
http://tif.ssrc.org/2019/04/30... more The Immanent Frame Rethinking Public Religion: Word, Image, Sound
In Anthropological Quarterly, Special Issue: New Directions in the Anthropology of Religion and Gender: Faith and Emergent Masculinities
This article explores the ritual creation of a distinct form of pious masculinity
among Pakistan... more This article explores the ritual creation of a distinct form of pious masculinity
among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic
piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani Tablighis practice a ritualized
form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) that they claim cultivates the
pious virtues that allow them to live ethically with kin, neighbors, and fellow
citizens. I argue that dawat entails a reflexive ethical stance on male
agency and represents an effort to manage the growing problem of male
violence in Pakistani life. I conclude by arguing that constructions of “religious
violence” so prevalent in the age of the Global War on Terror are
underpinned by liberal–secular assumptions about ritual as an absence of
critical thought and hierarchy as intrinsically violent. This liberal–secular
framework not only rationalizes secular power, it also elides the ethical work
that Tablighis are doing to address the violent afflictions of postcolonial modernity
in Pakistan.
Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of a transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat... more Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of a transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, insist that only their own form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) is capable of spreading Islamic virtue. Tablighis dismiss the efforts to spread Islam by a diverse array of Islamist actors, including political parties, corporations, NGOs, and popular televangelists. This highlights a central cleavage within the Islamic revival in Pakistan. While Islamists have adopted a modernist conception of religion associated with egalitarian individualism, Tablighis understand dawat to be a religious practice that entails an ethics of hierarchy in which one becomes virtuous by submitting to the authority of pious others. In dawat, Tablighis create a hierarchically structured world of pious sociality against the threat of egalitarian individualism in liberal and Islamist varieties.
The conclusion to The Promise of Piety argues that the struggle over the boundary of religion is ... more The conclusion to The Promise of Piety argues that the struggle over the boundary of religion is a key site through with claims to soveriegnty are articulated in modernity and outlines Islamic piety in the Tablighi Jamaat as a distinct form of sovereign transcendence.
The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order, 2024
The Promise of Piety examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching... more The Promise of Piety examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. The book highlights both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.
The central question of this class is what is politics? While many disciplines focus on the study... more The central question of this class is what is politics? While many disciplines focus on the study of formal state institutions like government and political parties, anthropologists ask how relations of power are distributed, organized, produced, and reproduced in social life and how they are contested. To this end, anthropologists are interested in the rituals, symbols and ideologies that shape relations of power and focus on how politics relates to other aspects of society like family, religion, and economics. The first part of this class will explore classic anthropological approaches to politics. Drawing on these theories, we will examine the forms of inequality and exclusion that structure the modern nation-state and explore the demands for equality, recognition and belonging from religious, ethnic, and racial minorities. We also explore the inequalities and imbalances of power between nation-states in a larger world system and how these power imbalances give rise to and inform approaches to human rights, humanitarianism, development, terrorism, and democracy.
Comment on Hierarchy as Democratic Value in India: An Informal Essay by Anastasia Piliavsky, Cur... more Comment on Hierarchy as Democratic Value in India: An Informal Essay by Anastasia Piliavsky, Current Anthro[pology, Vol. 64, No. 5.
Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety
movement, the Tablighi Jama... more Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, believe that Muslims have abandoned ‘religion’ (din) for ‘the world’ (dunya) and this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). The only way to draw Muslims to Islamic practice, they say, is through their own distinct, ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat), which is the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue because it is modelled on Prophetic example. In this article, I argue that dawat represents what Birgit Meyer has called a ‘sensational form’, an authorized set of practices and techniques for mediating a relationship to transcendental power and creating divine presence. But dawat is structured by an internal tension. On the one hand, dawat requires performing the Prophetic model in order to create a ‘direct’ relationship to God, but, on the other, creating a ‘connection’ between Muslims depends on incorporating new genres and mediums drawn from popular culture and mass media that stretch the boundaries of religion. This moral ambivalence, however, does not just lead to moral failure but instead is addressed through an emphasis on pious companionship (sohbat) and through submission to the authority of pious others. Moral ambivalence, therefore, becomes the generative ground for religious authority. The production and reproduction of religious authority in turn serves as the basis for incorporating novel forms of mediation in order to address diverse and changing social, political and economic contexts while retaining the aura of religious continuity.
Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam fro... more Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam from what they imagine to be a deluge of incidents of blasphemy, a veritable moral panic organized around a set of blasphemy laws pertaining to the regulation and protection of Islam. The violence of blasphemy politics, which is disproportionately directed at sectarian and religious minorities, is predicated on the claim that is the duty and mandate of the state to enforce the blasphemy laws, and where the state fails, the onus falls on ordinary Muslims to fulfill the demands of Islam. In this article, I focus on the response to this blasphemy politics by Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. Like other Islamic groups in Pakistan, Tablighis consider blasphemy to be a grave sin and a deep threat to the Islamic community, but Tablighis believe that the solution to the growing incidence of blasphemy is to spread virtue through their distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat). I show that these different ethical responses to blasphemy reflect different approaches to the relationship between Islam and state sovereignty. Specifically, I argue that blasphemy politics presupposes the sacralization of the state but Islamic piety among Pakistani Tablighis provides an alternative ethical framework for addressing the moral injury of blasphemy.
The Immanent Frame
Rethinking Public Religion: Word, Image, Sound
http://tif.ssrc.org/2019/04/30... more The Immanent Frame Rethinking Public Religion: Word, Image, Sound
In Anthropological Quarterly, Special Issue: New Directions in the Anthropology of Religion and Gender: Faith and Emergent Masculinities
This article explores the ritual creation of a distinct form of pious masculinity
among Pakistan... more This article explores the ritual creation of a distinct form of pious masculinity
among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic
piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani Tablighis practice a ritualized
form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) that they claim cultivates the
pious virtues that allow them to live ethically with kin, neighbors, and fellow
citizens. I argue that dawat entails a reflexive ethical stance on male
agency and represents an effort to manage the growing problem of male
violence in Pakistani life. I conclude by arguing that constructions of “religious
violence” so prevalent in the age of the Global War on Terror are
underpinned by liberal–secular assumptions about ritual as an absence of
critical thought and hierarchy as intrinsically violent. This liberal–secular
framework not only rationalizes secular power, it also elides the ethical work
that Tablighis are doing to address the violent afflictions of postcolonial modernity
in Pakistan.
Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of a transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat... more Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of a transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, insist that only their own form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) is capable of spreading Islamic virtue. Tablighis dismiss the efforts to spread Islam by a diverse array of Islamist actors, including political parties, corporations, NGOs, and popular televangelists. This highlights a central cleavage within the Islamic revival in Pakistan. While Islamists have adopted a modernist conception of religion associated with egalitarian individualism, Tablighis understand dawat to be a religious practice that entails an ethics of hierarchy in which one becomes virtuous by submitting to the authority of pious others. In dawat, Tablighis create a hierarchically structured world of pious sociality against the threat of egalitarian individualism in liberal and Islamist varieties.
Uploads
Papers by Arsalan Khan
The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. The book highlights both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.
movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, believe that Muslims have
abandoned ‘religion’ (din) for ‘the world’ (dunya) and this has
thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). The only way
to draw Muslims to Islamic practice, they say, is through their
own distinct, ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat),
which is the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue because it
is modelled on Prophetic example. In this article, I argue that
dawat represents what Birgit Meyer has called a ‘sensational
form’, an authorized set of practices and techniques for
mediating a relationship to transcendental power and creating
divine presence. But dawat is structured by an internal tension.
On the one hand, dawat requires performing the Prophetic
model in order to create a ‘direct’ relationship to God, but, on the
other, creating a ‘connection’ between Muslims depends on
incorporating new genres and mediums drawn from popular
culture and mass media that stretch the boundaries of religion.
This moral ambivalence, however, does not just lead to moral
failure but instead is addressed through an emphasis on pious
companionship (sohbat) and through submission to the authority
of pious others. Moral ambivalence, therefore, becomes the
generative ground for religious authority. The production and
reproduction of religious authority in turn serves as the basis for
incorporating novel forms of mediation in order to address
diverse and changing social, political and economic contexts
while retaining the aura of religious continuity.
Rethinking Public Religion: Word, Image, Sound
http://tif.ssrc.org/2019/04/30/piety-publicity-and-the-paradox-of-islamization/
among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic
piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani Tablighis practice a ritualized
form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) that they claim cultivates the
pious virtues that allow them to live ethically with kin, neighbors, and fellow
citizens. I argue that dawat entails a reflexive ethical stance on male
agency and represents an effort to manage the growing problem of male
violence in Pakistani life. I conclude by arguing that constructions of “religious
violence” so prevalent in the age of the Global War on Terror are
underpinned by liberal–secular assumptions about ritual as an absence of
critical thought and hierarchy as intrinsically violent. This liberal–secular
framework not only rationalizes secular power, it also elides the ethical work
that Tablighis are doing to address the violent afflictions of postcolonial modernity
in Pakistan.
The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. The book highlights both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.
movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, believe that Muslims have
abandoned ‘religion’ (din) for ‘the world’ (dunya) and this has
thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). The only way
to draw Muslims to Islamic practice, they say, is through their
own distinct, ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat),
which is the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue because it
is modelled on Prophetic example. In this article, I argue that
dawat represents what Birgit Meyer has called a ‘sensational
form’, an authorized set of practices and techniques for
mediating a relationship to transcendental power and creating
divine presence. But dawat is structured by an internal tension.
On the one hand, dawat requires performing the Prophetic
model in order to create a ‘direct’ relationship to God, but, on the
other, creating a ‘connection’ between Muslims depends on
incorporating new genres and mediums drawn from popular
culture and mass media that stretch the boundaries of religion.
This moral ambivalence, however, does not just lead to moral
failure but instead is addressed through an emphasis on pious
companionship (sohbat) and through submission to the authority
of pious others. Moral ambivalence, therefore, becomes the
generative ground for religious authority. The production and
reproduction of religious authority in turn serves as the basis for
incorporating novel forms of mediation in order to address
diverse and changing social, political and economic contexts
while retaining the aura of religious continuity.
Rethinking Public Religion: Word, Image, Sound
http://tif.ssrc.org/2019/04/30/piety-publicity-and-the-paradox-of-islamization/
among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic
piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani Tablighis practice a ritualized
form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) that they claim cultivates the
pious virtues that allow them to live ethically with kin, neighbors, and fellow
citizens. I argue that dawat entails a reflexive ethical stance on male
agency and represents an effort to manage the growing problem of male
violence in Pakistani life. I conclude by arguing that constructions of “religious
violence” so prevalent in the age of the Global War on Terror are
underpinned by liberal–secular assumptions about ritual as an absence of
critical thought and hierarchy as intrinsically violent. This liberal–secular
framework not only rationalizes secular power, it also elides the ethical work
that Tablighis are doing to address the violent afflictions of postcolonial modernity
in Pakistan.